Politics occurs in real time. That means that its procedures and events take place in the time it really takes to accomplish those things. That is different from other procedures and events that take place in vicarious experience, such as drama or movies or history books where time is foreshortened so that people as observers do not have to indulge in seeing everything unfold, cuts made in the film so that a walk in the woods is long enough to provide a sense of what it is like to be in the woods but not the entire time it takes to make the trip while real walks in the woods last so long as it takes to get from one place to another, to cover the distance. Vicarious experiences are allowed to be made more dramatic or presented with symbols and stereotypical characters so as to grasp what is happening in a thrice. But politics is vicarious in that except for a few events actually seen, like JFK as a Presidential candidate visiting the Bronx, politics is seen on television however much the issues or emotions that motivate politics are items of interest or not, impassioned or not, for deeply held or perhaps superficially arrived at because the slogans of the media make them seem appealing. It is a mistake to think that what Republicans believe are responses to their interests or their values rather than what they learn on the tube or could dispense with some slogans and adopt others with aplomb if there were a fashion to do so, as seems to be the case with people saying the 2020 election was rigged. They know that only vicariously; somebody told them that. That is different from watching sports, which last as long as they last and so critics have to come to understand why there is drama even in baseball, where there seem to be longueurs when what is happening is that people get beer and hot dogs and conversations while appreciating the ballpark and the crowds and the characteristic noise and pay attention when something important is happening. Color commentators, for their part, tie the television audience to what is broadcast on the field. That is why exhibiting a television broadcast of a football game without sportscasters proved unrewarding. There was an experiment where a New York Jet game some forty years ago was broadcast without the commentators, either play by play or for the color commentator, just to see if it would work. Viewers quickly signed off. All they could do was see their own living rooms to accompany the game while commentators brought the viewer into the picture, the talk from the television regularly updating what had transpired and what might happen next. So much for treating vicarious sports as in unalloyed real time. It needs dramatic emphasis to make it palatable. But politics is different and so its slow paced reality explains a lot about its dynamics and makes it always problematic how the viewers, the voters, are to make sense of what they experience, and so pay attention to its structured and emphasized drama and with less regard to the standby of demographics and policy as the engines of the engagement with the electorate and the political process.
Read MoreAnti-Abortion Rubbish
There is only one major policy or political decision about which I have changed my mind in the course of my life, and that is abortion. Moving from a Liberal, from Robert Kennedy, to a centrist, like Obama and Biden, doesn’t count because it was just recalibrating the spectrum and remaining rooted in the New Deal philosophy that big government and entitlements were a good thing. (Biden seems radical because his legislative agenda is so ambitious but its principles of expanding entitlements is part of the long time Liberal agenda.) And I am still a believer of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement even if the generations since then have altered the way to proceed to a more equal union. And i did move from supporting Head Start to opposing it, always having always been skeptical, but mainly in response to the scientific reports showed that it didn’t work as the way to improve education, though I like Biden’s initiative to fund all children below five year olds because it means allowing women to go to work and let kids get away from baleful home circumstances. Abortion was the great change because I shifted from seeing a zygote as a human being to responding to social circumstances because my daughter went off to college and I assured her that I would give money and support and arrangements if she got into trouble despite my outspoken beliefs about abortion despite the opposing views in my Liberal circles because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. If abortion would have been gppd enough for my daughter, then it should be available to any woman. The philosophical argument was replaced by the social argument that women alone took the burden of childbearing while men only provided insemination and so women had to decide now that medical science made abortion safe, because someone had to decide when to terminate pregnancies, however dubious I thought of the claim that women were always wise about making that decision. My position became and remains what Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be legal, safe and rare, and I still think so in that abortion is a bad thing, like an execution, but a necessary thing in some circumstances.
Read MoreKant and Marx: Should We Hate Jessica?
Here Is a radically different approach to describe morality, which is usually thought of as adding something to the descriptions of the world so as to provide a fuller picture of life. Kant put that usual view clearly and succinctly. It was inevitable, he thought, that people came up with the word “should” to describe the fact that people chose to do one thing rather than another out of obligation rather than just custom or taste or else people would not have real choices and that was clearly part of the nature of the world. I am saying otherwise. People use moral categories for a particular reason, which is to blame people, and they do so by noticing the aggregation of individuals into types or roles that are in opposition to one another and find that satisfying, which means that morality is in most cases unnecessary even if blaming people, including oneself, is an easy thing to do to explain people, as when one says that all people are subject to original sin or that some part of people can be clumped together as deficient morally because of their poverty or race. Aggregation is a useful device for illuminating the social world but it is a dangerous one because it breeds unnecessary anger and allegations and, like a good medicine, should be attributed only advisedly. The significance of this proposition is that morality is an attribute for manipulating language to different purposes rather than a discovery about morality as an inevitable feature of the universe that is.
Read MoreAlan Furst: Fiction and Theory
The protagonist of Alan Furst’s most recent novel “Under Occupation”, set in occupied Europe in 1942, is a mystery writer and he offers how to go about constructing a novel and the reader can infer how Furst does the deed himself. The fictional writer says that there should be invented characters who are types or contrary to types so as to make the characters interesting and that there should be added local color, such as the colors of streetcars, so as to provide an authentic atmosphere. First applies his own prescriptions into this novel. Some women are portrayed as experienced, some less so, and he shows how it rains on a November Paris street, doing particularly well how a train filled with Germans and civilians are strafed by the RAF. That makes a novel engaging and moves a story along. But what is important in a novel are not these mechanics which provide some entertainment but also what might be called the themes of the novel which give it some moment, the sense of the meanings that a novel captures as the way life itself, here and everywhere and not just in the Occupation work, and so raise a novel to being more than an entertainment, if the way the world works is distinctive and clear enough, so that the reader gets an Alan Furst novel, or a Joyce novel, or a Morrison novel, it having created world distinctive in its own at the same time as an insight into the overall metaphysical world to which it has entered. These structures or ways in which being exists, are not as easily replicated as the schoolbook rules about how to create a novel. They have to do with the wisdom the writer may or may not know about the metaphysical and actual worlds are structured and can be inherent in the way the writer composes or thinks, Hemingway having always known ever since his early stories that his sentences added up to his pointillism style while Mann accumulated learning and history to add to his fluid style, his best work, in my opinion, during his most mature work, with Joseph and His Brothers rather than in Death in Venice, just as the mature Dickens had a dark complexity from “Great Expectations” on that made minor the comic romps of “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”. So let us see what Furst does and not mind that he may not say what it is that he knows what he is doing.
Read MoreComfort and Irony
Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.
Read MoreSt. Anselm and the Indivisibility of God
Nowadays, most people who consider themselves to be religious rely on faith rather than reason. That means that they do not explain what results in the belief about the doctrines or liturgies of a religion, as is a proof of God or a miraculous cause that people believe was true, such as the Resurrection, but rather in a belief about a proposition about doctrine and liturgy that does not require explanation and so a believer refers to the confidence of one’s beliefs rather than for the proof or demonstration of one’s propositions. The believer looks at the consequences of beliefs rather than as the causes of belief and shows those consequences in the most flattering light, belief believing the cause of morality or decency or industriousness or happiness, putting aside the question that full blooded Christians, for example, can believe in a variety and even contradictory things, as when some Christians believe that Blacks and whites are to be forever separated or, on the other hand, melded into the greater single humanity. Believers cannot avoid making judgments or reasons aside from their faith as to what inferences to make about their faiths and so are on their own, like everyone else, independent of faith as to what to make of the consequences of faith. That is an inherent paradox of religion, which is that its beliefs are volitional even as they seem to be enjoined by the premises and we shall look into the most abstract way of having discussed that, by St. Anselm in his proof of God, to clarify that as best he can.
Read MoreClose Votes
It was both exciting and moving for a politics buff like myself to see at around midnight on the night of Nov.5-6, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Bill and passed a procedural hurdle for the Build Back Better Act, paving the way for the passage of that in two weeks time. The elaborate parliamentary procedures which assure that bills passed into law are properly legislated meant that the procedures are ceremonial and repetitious and for that reason all the more dramatic. I watched on live television to see the vote build up, the “yes” votes staying close to twenty votes ahead of the opponents until it became clear that the bill had passed because there were not enough votes left so that the margin of winning could not be overtaken even if all the remaining representatives had voted against it. Then, because this was an important bill, there was a vote on whether to table the bill, and that was defeated, that requiring the process of voting to happen all over again, the tallies going up on the electronic devices for voting as well as requiring members for a second time to announce to the Speaker that they are informing the body that so and so is voting although absent as either yea or nay. This new rule was adopted by the House so that members who are sick from Covid need not be present in the body in order to vote, something that previously had not been allowed. So we saw the same faces saying again that the same names would say yes or no, and that was dramatic for its repetition as if someone might change their mind or if the tallies would be different, and in fact the bill to override tabling the bill did have a different result than the bill itself. The tabling resolution was a party line vote while the original bill passage had some Republican and Democratic crossovers. Then there was a procedural vote for the Build Back Better bill that passed though the Democrats passed it by only nine votes, which testified how hard it was to corral all of the Democratic Caucus to agree to it if it were to pass. What an observer of these proceedings could see was the majesty of Article One of the Constitution, which describes the powers of theCongress, that it can move legislation, as unwieldy and slow as the proceedings may be to accomplish a vote. The power of the Constitution to get things done is actual and visible, despite, as I have said in a previous blog post, there are claims that congresspeople are marionettes whose strings are pulled by elsewhere and by sinister powers. It seems to me that the good and the bad of Congress is right out there: hard negotiations behind the scenes to get narrow majorities on the floor.
Read MorePower Is What It Seems To Be
What is power? Max Weber defined it as the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do while influence is to be defined as the ability w to convince people to do what it is you want them to do. Employers have power over employees because they can fire them and so those who have unequal power will do what the boss wants because the employee wants his or her paycheck. A priest has power because a member of the laity believes there are serious consequences if the churchman decides the member to be engaged in sinfulness. On the other hand, a charismatic churchman can lead a follower to prefer to do what the churchman thinks is the right thing. That is influence rather than power. So far so good. The difficult question about power is whether all the different kinds of power are versions of the same thing or process, to be known properly as power itself, or whether each form of power is independent of one another and arises out of the particular process under observation. In that case, and here I follow Weber in his view of power, there is no need to even any longer use the term “power” except as a metaphor for some of the consequences of deploying some of the traits of the process under examination. An employer has power because he or she can fire someone when firing people is just an aspect of being in an employment arrangement in the first place just as social power is just a fanciful way of saying that men will disparage ugly women and so in this way men have power over women. Moreover, whether to think or not that there is an essential quality called power has consequences for understanding how society operates and also taking sides on particular controversies.
Read MoreLoud and Quiet Screams
Some people are loud in that they talk a lot or have a high pitched or full throated voices and so people who are usually quiet but occasionally say a good deal are thought as unusual and deep. Other people are quiet in that they say little and that can also be inferred to be people who are deep or maybe simple. Whatever the case, these conditions are considered matters of character, the kind of person a person is, rather than a superficial matter and so not at all obvious as it sounds, but something inside the personhood, some avenue into the sanctity of minds ever imprisoned in their skulls. But people who are sometimes loud and sometimes not are not regarded as another form of character but as an aberration. People are inferred to be disjointed or out of sorts, and so inferred, at the least, as a clue of disquiet, even if it might seem just as ordinary a state of things as the other more consistent tones or characters. In particular, people who scream are thought to be particularly distraught, and it is worth examining a scream as a social phenomenon.
Read MoreLe Carre: The Secret and the Ordinary
A standard distinction between the English and the American novel from Defoe to E. M. Foster and from James Fennimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before the categories got changed by Modernism, is the subject matter. English novels are about family life while American novels are about social problems: the frontier for Cooper, organizations purposeful and purposeless in Melville, slavery and inequality for Twain, Howells about labor and Wharon is about the status of women and Fitzgerald is concerned with Jazz Age ambitions. Another way to deal with those novelists writing in English is their ideology or point of view. Dickens is a Christian conservative, George Eliot is a Christian liberal, and Wilkie Collins is a liberal secularist, while Twain is also a liberal secularist but Hawthorne was concerned with sin and salvation and Melville was bitter about the failure or death of God. Here is a third way to sort out the English language novelists and it has to do with the characters of people as open or closed. The major strand is that people are open in that people are what they seem to be. The reader is able to get enough cues to figure out what a person is all about and, presumably, can read real people in that way too. Defoe thought everyone was rational and so understandable. Elizabeth Bennet thought she was outspoken and so some people found her difficult while everybody, including himself, thought Darcey to be arrogant. We know who Fagin is and not to trust his scheming and we know Pip is pliable but carries a torch for a very long time. No secrets are unrevealed in that strand of the English-writing novel. Ahab has mysteries the reader can’t penetrate but we know that itself to be the problem, his secrecy a concern for everyone around him. Wharton’s Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” knows what her problem is, that she is getting old without having secured a position. On the other hand, there is a minor strand of writers who are difficult to phantom. Twain makes mysterious all the people in Hadleyville without using much of a gimmick, which makes that story a very striking work of art, while the idea that people are not visible is so strange a perception in art as well as in life that their authors have to often adopt a deliberate role by which people act to make themselves cloaked. Melville adopts a confidence man so as to see the mysterious and labyrinthian ways through which people can avoid and attract themselves to Christianity, and so do Conrad’s anarchists and those who follow into the world of espionage: Graham Green also to find his way to Christianity, and most recently, and the subject of this present occasion, John Le Carre. Let’s elaborate on how he does that.
Read MoreMoney Isn't Fungible
Economists say that money is fungible. What they mean by that is that it can be traded for any number of different commodities. A school can use its money to replace the roof or to buy new textbooks. That is why some legislators don't like giving private schools money to compensate for keeping attendance records or having school lunches. It means their money can be reallocated to religious instruction. Some other than money certificates are also at least partially fungible. Frequent flier miles can be credited for gaining flights to any number of destinations so long as you use the same airline.There are also other matters that do not seem to be economic which are also fungible. Affection is partly fungible in that the affection of a spouse is transferred to an inlaw or at least given the benefit of the doubt until events warrant treating a person otherwise. All that is required is that something can be spread around by a party which has some entitlement to do so, as is indicated by a dollar bill, and whatever is exchanged can be retained by the person who engages in the trade. The exact value or unit of exchange may not be clear,but it is useful to provide denominations whereby amounts of the fungible product are comparable. It is hard to trade diamonds all of which are large but there can be produced diamonds of various qualities and sizes. Sex is clearly fungible in that it is a service that can be traded for any number of different things, from money to social position to affection and so the market on sex is highy controlled by the customs and laws of society so as to assure the value remains of high value, so that it can be exchanged for marriage, and so that people do not become too coarse in their exchanges, and so people continue to ssociate sex with affection, though some people think it liberating to dissociate the two.
Read MoreThe Shopkeeper's Lament
Karl Marx used the petit bourgeoisie, which are the small shopkeepers in organizations of, let us say, ten or less-- the people nowadays who run restaurants and got such a hard time because of Coronavirus-- so as to distinguish them from the haute bourgeoisie, who are the entrepreneurs of wealth and with large organizations that have a significant impact on the means of production: the factories and the mines that make steel and locomotives. The petit bourgeoisie are not really important business people, just occupations that offer a living. But Marx was a genius at identifying a distinctive mentality that went along with a particular line of work. He later developed the idea of “functionary” to describe the civil servants and other hangers on that allowed France’s Second Empire to continue to survive despite its political and economic failures. The shopkeepers are also a type in that they follow a way of life determined by their economic situation that molds the way they live and think and feel. My father was one of these, though not started out as one, but rather as a baker, who is a member of the skilled working class, and he adjusted to the new role of running a ma and pa grocery store and then to the proprietor of a small supermarket.
Read MoreThe Human Condition Persists
How do you evaluate the human condition? Are the basic and inevitable characteristics of human life such that it is great or lousy or so-so? It might be more like Hobbes’ brutish and nasty, red in tooth and claw, a dog eat dog existence only barely mitigated by civil order or, on the other hand, the human condition might be like a weekend family barbeque where the only anxiety amidst the enjoyment of gazing at your wife and children is making sure to turn on the tv to see the football game. Is the human condition closer to heaven or to hell? This question is very difficult to answer because there is only one human condition to contemplate, all the comparisons merely thought experiments. Moreover, it is difficult to assess what is to be included within the human condition. It could include that people are not able to directly enter the consciousness of another person, as if there were a mind meld, or there were just a shared experience for a brief period of time with someone else’s thoughts and feelings about their own discreditable habits or cravings (horrible) or only their more attractive features, such as a will to do the decent thing (heavenly or still just awful to experience in someone else’s skin). Another thing to think about that it is possible to imagine but not realize is that people cannot travel in time so as to alter or even just contemplate when Washington crossed the Delaware or when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment or when the west was anything over the Appalachians. Did our sense of ourselves very different when traveling in those circumstances? We experiment at that all the time by reading history, our imaginations conveyed to us through books, but would we be very different if we could in fact transport ourselves in that way? I wonder how awful it would have been to confront a world where Hiitler was alive and well in 1940. Would I always be terrified or just continuing on the usual things of getting through school and work and courtship or, more likely, having to do all of those things all at once, aware of both world politics and the quotidian, as one does every day during this or any other time.
Read MoreAbolishing Drugs the Soft Way
Unlike Prohibition, which was a failure at abolishing alcohol because rates of alcohol use were by the Seventies back to pre-Prohibition levels, social programs to eliminate tobacco were extremely successful and should be applied to another addiction problem, those of illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin. The soft approach to the very harsh reality of drugs which diminish the capacities of the users and plague the neighborhoods whereby drug financed gangs engage in drive by and random shootings and seem incapable of becoming resolved are programs that do not require Supreme Court decisions or major legislation, while the abortion debates seem never to end and environmental debates on air pollution and fossil feul emissions remain a quandary despite efforts of legislation to control them. The soft model is large scale reeducation of the population and making drug use simply inconvenient. Tobacco use was everywhere present in 1965 in that 42% of Americans used cigarettes and cigarette encouragement was everywhere in TV and print advertising. Cigarette companies had major lobbies so as to maintain their power. But by 2018, smokers were now down to 14% of the population and, even more, only 8% of those between the ages of 18 and 24, suggesting that the younger cohort of the population were using even fewer smokes, that defined as daily or every second day use, and so the habit was dying off. This happened, even though it took half a century to accomplish, because there was widespread publicity of the report of the Surgeon General’s Report of 1965 that smoking led to cancer, and lawsuits by state Attorneys General to sue tobacco companies for providing cancer killing products, and also, perhaps most important, restrictions by municipalities, one by one, to make cigarette smoking more difficult. Public buildings were barred from smoking, and so smokers congregated on their plazas during work breaks. Then universities and colleges barred students and teachers from smoking, and then restaurants. It just became just too difficult to manage. Rather than treating personality problems to be the cause of addiction, with studies showing how useful tobacco addiction is to well-being, there was the development of operational shortcuts to avoid smoking, such as tieing a box of cigarettes with rubber bands so that it took time and effort to get at a cigarette. People eliminated ashtrays, much less cigarette boxes, on their coffee tables and side tables. And so cigarettes are largely over. Solution accomplished. What next for a public outcry, this time against heroin and cocaine, that is beyond the political, that sidesteps the political?
Read MoreThe Top of the World
Heading west on Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon, the route passes through the Rockies in an unusual way. Rather than trails and roads finding their way through passes between the mountains so as to see the valleys between, which is what happens later on in our route to Seattle, when the lush valleys can be seen suddenly uncovered in their sunshine and shadows, idyllic places rather than the rough places of the peaks that are higher by far than where the roads go through it, Interstate 84 instead finds its way on top of the mountains, moving from high point to high point, these not apexes but extended ridges where the trees to both sides are of the same elevation as the road, no cliffs to see, nor the valleys either, because the trees are enough to prevent looking at a gap or offering a clearing. The result is that the passing cars offer a sense of being on top of the world, a continuous thing that goes for a long distance and so making the whole vistaless view seem miraculous, a deep insight into how there is nothing higher but nothing depressed and so offering a very little angle of vision. This experience is remarkably pleasurable partly because it is so unusual a vantage point, or rather the lack of a vantage point, and even more so because the whole scene seems to float without a top and a bottom, as if there were a natural equality in which people (or trees) were embedded, rather than a natural inequality whereby something is always either higher or lower, these the differences in geometry about something very fundamental about social life, which is that equality and inequality are the two natural states of social existence with inequality the predominant quality. We all float amidst the unusual sight of the equal society of trees surrounding one another and those who observe them rather than some more elevated than others, looking at other companion trees rather than in the distance. Isn't equality grand?
Read MoreThe Haitian Mess
There are three ways to approach the mess in Haiti, its failure as a society, which was best symbolized by the 15,000 Haitian refugees, now down to zero, that for a week or so crowded in an underpass near Del Rio, Texas. What was to be done about them and what to do with Haiti? The first proposal, propounded at the time by journalists, local politicians and the American diplomat who resigned over the issue, is to do the humane thing, regardless of what the law says, and grant asylum to the Haitians because there is no life to be found in Haiti given its earthquake, its political disruption and its failure to make a living for its people. After all, we allow any Cubans who get to the United States to remain there because of the remnants of a Cold War that ended 35 years ago. Haiti has about the same population as Cuba, about 11 million, even if Haiti is one third the size of Cuba and Haiti is the most densely concentrated population in the Western Hemisphere. Why not let in the ones who can manage to get to America, the failure of Haiti to thrive being sufficient reason? The Monroe Doctrine has been taken to mean that the United States takes responsibility for its hemisphere so as to preclude foreign control of the area, and so the United States cannot pawn off Haiti to France just because of their related language and history. Moreover, the United States has regularly intruded into Haiti. The U. S. Marines occupied the nation during the Twenties so as to pacify the nation and Bill Clinton both restored a legitimate Presidency to Haiti and then took up a major initiative to reconstruct the nation economically after one of its regular earthquakes. Why not now, after another earthquake and another period of political unrest? What was done before can be done again, never mind the debate about immigration policies having to do with any number of other peoples trying to make it into the United States. Think of immigration as a blessing rather than a problem. It shows that people want to come to the United States so as to achieve better lives. Would one prefer people not to want to get to the United States, legally or not? The pressure of immigration shows the U.S. is thriving. As one wag put it, take two billion dollars from Biden’s 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation package, and then Haiti could be reconstructed into being a respectable nation.
Read MorePresent, Past, and Future
Here is an easy situation in which people can appreciate the experience of past, present and future rather than use time as something that is measured, as happens in a clock, where time is just something, whatever it is, that “moves” past. Think of a game of rummy. The cardplayer anticipates what card will come up to complete your rummy or to have a few enough cards so you can “knock”. Every time you are about to pick a card is an anticipation that is needed. Those successive picks until the one card you pick are the future. There are multiple possibilities and keep the cardplayer anxious about what the next card will be. People live in or for the future and it is not easy to describe which proposition “in” or “for” is to apply. When the card you need turns up is in the present. It is an event for the instant satisfaction that it lasts as a card player appreciates that a card has changed the situation advantageously. The memory of all of those times when an unsatisfactory card did not turn up is the past, the collection of failed opportunities, that lets a calculating cardplayer increase the chances of getting the card you want because of the failed opportunities of the cards that have been discarded. What applies to card playing as a way to emphasize the appreciation of past, present and future is the aesthetic or metaphysical pleasure of playing cards.
Read MoreThe French Submarines
The decision by the Biden Administration to declare that it would build nuclear submarines with Australia and the United Kingdom rather than conventional submarines with the French was significant and controversial and leads into some very complex matters even though that decision is only a very short blip on the political horizon and will have no impact on the midterms. First off, that decision would have seemed unnecessary. Ever since Henry Kissinger negotiated the Shanghai Communique in 1972, it might have seemed unnecessary to present a significant military force to confront the Chinese by having nuclear subs stay indefinitely on station between China and Formosa, something conventional submarines apparently can't do. The Kissinger plan was that China and the United States would become economically interdependent and so not likely to face up in a war. The two powers avoided the containment policy that relied on military power to keep the Soviet Union under control until it had matured enough as an economic nation and had put aside its totalitarian political and social system so that it would no longer be a belligerent party. Maybe all the submarine sabre-rattling is overdone because it only means that there has to be an additional force to help guide the two superpowers through the inevitable antagonism that results from the fact that the two are so powerful, but it is still unnerving in that the United States was in a Cold War in the Twentieth Century that lasted from 1949 until 1989 and that except for particularly adroit mutual management and a lot of luck, the two superpowers might have gone on to a nuclear war, and the fear of that shrouded two generations. We don’t want that again. I went through it the first time and the prospect of it by younger people may not appreciate its gravity.
Read MoreThe Secret of Education
Georg Simmel, one of the foundational theorists of sociology, never offered a theory of education, but he observed many strange or exotic social structures that are applicable to a variety of very usal events. One of these is the secret society, where people bind together with one another through oaths and rituals and signs known only to their other members and that accomplish and share between themselves a special illumination or purpose. Secret societies include the Ku Klux Klan, the Shriners, and the Masons, and so seem outlandish and different from the usual walks of life. That definition, however, includes some pretty pervasive and even largely inclusive parts of a population. Christianity is a secret society. Part of its genius is that membership is offered to anyone who sincerely agrees to be a follower of Jesus and there are numerous rituals, such as the Mass or declaring one to have been born again, which make you within the community rather than outside of it, the reward of which, for that belief, is that in some sense or other a participant or member is offered eternal life, whatever that may come to mean over time. Fellow members understand what they are up to so that Christians may think that an annulment is not much different from a divorce but for the sake of form the distinction is respected as the Catholic way of doing things, and Protestants will think themselves transformed or saved in that they have been financially successful. Those inside get one another or act as if they do, however much friction there may be between denominations or national churches, some theologians and pastors arguing the cut off point between membership and its reward and those outside of membership. Is a Mormon a Christian or is a Mormon not so, whatever their protestations, because Mormons do not believe in original sin while all other Christians do? Other secret societies may be more trivial but also pervasive. Children join clubs that have special jackets and thereby are entitled to friendship and loyalty, as do military organizations, where there is less emphasis on illumination than on duty and suffering.
Read MoreWhat's Next?
When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?
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